Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Obama's State of the Union reveals a shrinking lame duck presidency

Last night President Obama's fifth State of the Union address, (sixth if you count his 2009 non-State of the Union), showed the shrinking lame duck Obama presidency. You can see this clearly by surveying the media's reaction to the mediocre speech.

In an Associated Press article titled, "Analysis: Obama's Agenda More Bite-Sized Than Bold," Nancy Benac wrote that, "The president's State of the Union address Tuesday was an amalgam of modest proposals designed to chip away at some of the same problems he's been working on all along: persistent unemployment, middle-class insecurity, lagging schools and more."

That theme was continued on CBS News when John Dickerson reported, "If you look at the specifics of what he's going to do - he's going to raise the minimum wage for companies that work with the federal government. Well that's a very small amount. He's gonna set up a special thing at the Treasury Department, a savings account. That's a very small thing. He's going to convene C.E.O.s., he's going to meet with college professors, he's going to cut some red tape and take care of some permitting blockages. That is very small bore stuff compared to the claims the President made tonight and his aides have been making in terms of his acting."

Also during CBS's SOTU coverage, Norah O'Donnell put it this way, "I think the rest of his speech really just proved, that Obama's proposals have gone from grand to granular. Right? From these grand sweeping proposals at the beginning of his second term to the granule, kind of more modest scaled back proposals."

In an Article titled, "Obama Outlines Modest Plans in State of the Union Before Country Turns the Page: Audacity of a more limited scope," Time's Alex Altman and Zeke Miller, reported that Obama's SOTU speech was littered with recycled ideas, "He offered 'a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class, and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class.' But virtually all of them, from manufacturing initiatives to wider broadband access, were ideas Obama has plugged before."

On Fox News, The Daily Beast's Kirsten Powers said the speech was oversold and poll-tested, "The things he listed off, whether it's student debt or Pre-K funding are things that he brings up all the time because they poll very well. But the speech was definitely oversold by the White House in the sense that we were told to expect sort of this urgency. I really did not hear any urgency, I was expecting more of a, you know, we're in really dire straits and that's why I have to pull out my pen, and why I have to take things into my own hands. And that was really missing from the speech."